Shakespeare and the USA

These 6 minutes of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert are very much worth your time. I've queued this video to the relevant section. Ian McKellen explains the monologue, penned by Shakespeare's own hand, that was never acted in theater until Ian McKellen himself took on the role. It's an original Shakespearean role, then McKellen acts it out for us on stage for Colbert's audience.

These are powerful words which could just as well be directed at the USA today, rather than England 400 years ago.

Watch on YouTube

Click to find some minor details about the ICE invasion in north Minneapolis today...

If the relevance isn't obvious, then watch "ICE RAIDS DAY 66" (today's) livestream from Mercado Media. The relevant points of time are these:

• 4:51:12, with several ICE vehicles and a swarm of more than a dozen agents abducting someone, in my area of north Minneapolis.
• 4:53:50, where Mercado Media drives onto Broadway near the Cub grocery where I shop in person when the micro-bus takes me there, then follow the path I walk when I have to walk home from Cub, turning north on Emerson, and continuing north past 26th (when I turn towards home).
• 4:59:10, where they get out of their car again to record ICE agents trying to abduct someone
• 6:01:01, where they get out of the car again at an intersection 1 block north of where I shopped today for groceries and bought lunch at the small store I mention occasionally, one that locks their doors to eliminate "public space" that ICE tries to invade.
• 6:28:20, where they get out of the car again to record ICE agents.

Throughout that stretch of time, the videographer keeps mentioning that they haven't seen ICE so active in north Minneapolis before. That's my neighborhood. *sigh* They steal people, tear families apart, and occasionally murder people in cold blood, but some people still insist this is just good "law and order" activity from our federal government. The President's armed forces invading communities is just how things should be.

Go listen again to that Shakespeare speech by Ian McKellen. Go read again those Bible stories that Republican Speaker Mike Johnson claimed to understand better than the Pope. Stephen Colbert delivers this impressive repudiation.

I want a technology that helps us control the universe splitting into alternate realities. Let's cause a split where population A gets to go one direction and population B gets to go a different direction. Each "side" would be better off, wouldn't it? Nobody's harmed. The pluralists enjoy their heterogeneity, and the xenophobes enjoy their homogeneity. Everybody wins. (Secretly, I assume the xenophobes degenerate into further nitpicking amongst themselves when they have to choose a new pecking order amongst their smaller population, and their rigid authoritarianism collapses entirely.) But everyone wins, because they get exactly the world that they want, right?